Robert Scoble has posted a Sparkle video on Channel 9 and announced that Sparkle has released a public beta. He also asks what we think.

Well Scoble, I think you’re chasing a market you can’t win. Sparkle not only has to be good, but it has to differentiate itself, and now that Macromedia and Adobe have joined, they really are a behemoth in the design space. But they aren’t getting bogged down by their size. They’re going to take the synergies of the two companies and create some great tools.

Microsoft will always be playing catch-up because designers trust the Adobe name, they have years of experience in the design space, and their innovation in the space is second to none. Being able to combine the Flash Platform with powerful Adobe tools is going to give designers a medium that extends across all platforms.

Sparkle just doesn’t really bring anything new to the space. It doesn’t do anything revolutionary. The team says there isn’t anything like this tool out there, but that’s not true. Flex Builder provides all of the functionality that Sparkle does, with the addition that the language to extend it, ActionScript, is well known not only by developers but by designers.

Competition is always good, and I think the Flex team will step it up and we’ll get an even better product because of Sparkle, but they have a big head start, a better tool, and a larger developer community.